Growing Up with the Country

Abstract

Growing Up with the Country documents the migration of freedom’s first generation out of the South and into the West after the Civil War. A narrative history, the book traces three of the author’s ancestors and their successive migrations in the half-century after emancipation. Between 1865 and 1915, tens of thousands of former slaves sought freedom through a series of experiments in land ownership, town building, and emigration that spanned the Mississippi delta, Arkansas, Kansas, Indian Territory, Texas, West Africa, western Canada, Mexico, and beyond. Deepening and widening the roots of the Great Migration, the book argues that their lives and choices complicate notions of the quintessential domesticity and “biracialism” of the nadir, revealing instead the deeply transnational and multiracial dimensions of freedom’s first generation. The book shows that Indian Territory and early Oklahoma served as one of the first sites of African-American transnational movement in the postemancipation period, decentering the United States in North American history even at the turn of the “American century.” It illustrates the gradual emergence of American “biracialism” and the painstaking construction of race and nation that undergirded the rise of American economic, political, and cultural power at the turn of the twentieth century. Finally, the book reveals that historical erasure of this multiracial, multinational past depended upon the manipulation of family and kinship.